Fanfic moaning

[galadhir]

It's very odd how it always seems to go this way: You write what you think is one of your best fics ever, and it gets absolute silence from readers. You write a throwaway thing that you don't think is much good, and it gets more comments than you could have imagined.

I'm currently doing the first thing of those. I think 'Visitation' is really good. And more than that, I'm actually enjoying writing it to the extent that I am excited about it and rotating it in my head like I used to do with stories back when I was a proper writer. But I post it and... crickets.

Meanwhile I've just come off what I thought was a rather pointless piece of kid-fic, and that was getting twenty comments per chapter.

And it wouldn't matter so much if I had any idea what made one more popular than the other. Is it just that this one is in Xichen's pov instead of Jin Guangyao's? Is it that JGY is dead in this one, and it might take him a few years to come back? IDK. I cannot have become a worse writer in the space of the two weeks between one fic and the next, so it must be the subject matter and not me, but it is a bit baffling and discouraging.

Never mind. Visitation is for me, so I'm going to continue to write it for me. Whether I continue to post it or not is another matter.

Comments

[watervole]

What you're saying makes complete sense. I would have though that background would make Xichen a layered and interesting character.

Sadly, as you say, may people expect characters to know what the viewer knows about who is good and evil. But they are not omniscient - they do not know how the story ends.

[galadhir]

Esactly - you really have to take into account what the character knows, and what their intentions are, and that requires taking an emotional step backwards from the immediacy of what is going on in the story. For some reason I've never been able to like heroes, so that part comes easily to me, but I daresay it's harder if you can always expect your favourite characters to triumph in the end, because you think that's what storytelling is all about.